Privacy in cloud computing environments: a survey and research challenges

Definitely, cloud computing represents a real evolution in the IT world that provides many advantages for both providers and users. This new paradigm includes several services that allow data storage and processing. However, outsourcing data to the cloud raises many issues related to privacy concerns. In fact, for some organizations and individuals, data privacy present a crucial aspect of their business. Indeed, their sensitive data (health, finance, personal information, etc.) have a very important value, and any infringement of privacy can cause great loss in terms of money and reputation. Therefore, without considering privacy issues, the adoption of cloud computing can be discarded by large spectra of users. In this paper, we provide a survey on privacy risks and challenges for public cloud computing. We present and evaluate the main existing solutions that have made great progress in this area. To better address privacy concerns, we point out considerations and guidelines while giving the remained open issues that require additional investigation efforts to fulfill preserving and enhancing privacy in public cloud.